Greetings

The First Word
by Rabbi Tuvia Bolton

Once, the chasid Reb Mendel Futerfas saw one of his friends coming out of the room in the synagogue where pages of holy books are stored until the are buried (as it is forbidden to dispose of them in a disrespectful manner). The friend had a pile of torn pages in hand.

"What are you doing with those?" asked Reb Mendel.

"I take them home and sew them together and make a book!" the friend answered. (This was during the day of Communist rule in Russia when there was a tremendous shortage of holy books).

"But what kind of book will that be?" Reb Mendel asked, "There will be no beginning and no end, just unrelated pages! How can you read a book like that?"

His friend replied simply, " There are three aspects to the Torah:
studying the Torah, understanding the Torah, and the holiness of the Torah. The first two are accessed through wisdom and understanding, but the holiness of the Torah is in the letters themselves, and that's what my book will be about"

The upcoming holiday of Shavuot is one of the most important of all the Jewish Holidays. It celebrates the Giving of the Torah. Without the Torah not only would we not know the commandments, but by now there would be no Jewish people (G-d forbid).

In fact, the famous commentator Rashi (Gen. 1:31) states that if the Jews hadn't accepted the Torah on Shavuot, the whole world would have ceased to exist.

If so, Shavuot is actually the most important day in the history of the world.

Yet, if we examine what happened on the day that the Torah was given, it seems anticlimactic: The Jews did not receive the entire Torah or even most of it; they heard only ten simple commandments.

One would think that after 210 years of Egyptian slavery, mind-boggling miracles including the plagues, the splitting of the sea, manna from heaven, and more, they would get something a little more impressive or at least more mystical than ten obvious commandments, Don't kill, Don't steal, etc.; statutes which can be found in even the most primitive of cultures!

But the answer is that on that first Shavuot, G-d gave.... Himself.

The first word of the Ten Commandments sums it all up: "Anochi - I."

G-d has many names. According to Kabala each name corresponds to a different facet of G-d's infinite "personality." But the name "Anochi"
("I") is not one of them. It refers to something that is above all names or facets; it is the essence of G-d himself. And this is what the Jews received at Mount Sinai - G-d Himself.

The experience was so unique that until this day no one can even begin to understand it. In fact no religion has ever even claimed that such a thing happened to them!

With the first commandment alone, with "Anochi Hash-m Elokecha - I am the L-rd your G-d" G-d united Himself with each and every Jewish soul for all time.

"Anochi" became "Elokecha," literally "your G-d," singular.

What this means today is that when a Jew studies Torah, any aspect of the Torah, or does any mitzva (command-ment), s/he can feel that G-d is very, very close. In fact, closer than we are to our own selves.

It's called "The Jewish Feeling" or, the G-dly Soul. It's what draws people to Jewish experiences. That is what we are celebrating on Shavuot.

Rabbi Bolton is the assistant dean of Ohr Tmimim yeshiva in Israel.